The Veil Is Tearing: Daniel

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today-

I wish, I wish he’d go away.

–Hughes Mearns

Dr. Daniel Lewis can’t remember the last time he was alone. He tried to explain this, once, in a fit of drunken despair. It was after 2 AM, which would have been his first clue if he hadn’t been a dumb college kid distracted by assignments and the occasional inexplicable happening. Happenings like his blackouts, or the Word documents that appeared every now and then on his laptop, rambling tidbits of philosophy that he couldn’t remember writing. He turned to someone who seemed to be equally out of his mind on Jager bombs and who knows what else, and told him about the demon who lived inside his head. Daniel could always feel it, grinning, grumbling, or simply using his eyes to peer out at the living world. Even when it slept, he could almost feel the dull thrum of its snoring.

The wasted kid said he would totally see the movie that Daniel was making, once the screenplay was finished. Then he spent the next twenty minutes in a locked bathroom stall.

Daniel had had another blackout that night, though he couldn’t tell if it was from the demon or the alcohol. A few days later, he heard that the wasted kid had been checked into an in-patient rehabilitation clinic. Something about a drug-induced psychotic break. Poor bastard.

These days, Daniel saves his heart-to-hearts for his charges: the mad ones, the men (and they are usually men) with the locations of bodies locked inside fractured minds. It’s possible that he hopes to find someone who shares his unique condition. It’s also possible that he’s simply most at home among the mad and the dead.

So, Daniel doesn’t have many people he can turn to when he starts to hear whispers of other voices. There’s a storm brewing in the spaces between this reality and the next. Even the demon is ill at ease, jittering somewhere in the recesses of Daniel’s mind.

With his (or the demon’s?) abilities, Daniel is in a unique position to deal with the coming darkness. Kant would call it a moral imperative.